Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy novel follows Alice through a dreamlike world of strange creatures, shifting rules, and comic wordplay.
Down the Rabbit-Hole: The opening chapter in which Alice follows the White Rabbit underground and enters Wonderland. Alice’s fall begins the novel’s journey through a world where ordinary expectations fail.
Lewis Carroll: The pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English writer, mathematician, and photographer. Carroll created Alice’s story and shaped its distinctive blend of logic and nonsense.
Alice Liddell: An Englishwoman who, as a child, inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. Carroll first improvised the tale for Liddell and her sisters during a boating trip.
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: Lewis Carroll’s illustrated manuscript version of the Alice story, completed in 1864 and presented to Alice Liddell. Comparing the manuscript with the published novel shows how Carroll expanded and revised the tale.
Logic and nonsense: The relationship between valid reasoning and language or situations that appear absurd or meaningless. The novel uses precise arguments to produce conclusions that expose the instability of ordinary sense.
The Mad Tea-Party: A chapter in which Alice joins the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Dormouse at a tea table. Its circular conversation and frozen tea time embody the novel’s absurdity.
Victorian literature: Literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901. The novel emerged from a period whose children’s books often carried moral and educational aims.
John Tenniel: An English illustrator and political cartoonist who created the original illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His images established enduring visual forms for Alice and Wonderland’s inhabitants.
Through the Looking-Glass: Lewis Carroll’s 1871 sequel in which Alice enters a world organized like a chess game. The sequel revisits Alice’s adventures but gives Wonderland a more systematic structure.
Identity: The qualities and continuities by which a person or thing is recognized as itself. Alice repeatedly questions who she is as her body, memories, and surroundings change.